La empatía en los vínculos escolares - Carina Kaplan

Main ideas and concepts

• Trigger context: school violence and social pain

  • The talk is framed around a real, recent school killing in Argentina: a child murdered by a classmate using a shotgun.
  • The speaker argues that such events force society to reflect because school mirrors society: structural violence outside school “echoes” inside educational settings.

• School as refuge vs. school as trauma

  • For some students, school functions as a refuge (safe, cared for, protected).
  • For others, school becomes traumatizing, compounding existing pain from vulnerable childhood conditions and family difficulties.
  • Students experience a broader era-wide emotional force called social pain, and children/youth suffer disproportionately.

• Why empathy: “feeling the other’s pain”

  • The central educational goal is educating in empathy, especially the part of empathy defined as recognizing and validating the other person’s pain.
  • Metaphor: “I feel your pain.”
  • Claim: empathy helps schools build relationships that reduce violence and strengthen coexistence.

• School’s two core functions—emphasizing the social function

  • Schools teach academic content, but they also have a less-discussed function:
    • Socialization and sociability: learning how to build bonds with adults and peers.
  • Students learn coexistence in a “social laboratory” over many hours with diverse people.

• Affective/symbolic proximity as the goal of relationships

  • Mere physical proximity isn’t enough; schools should aim for:
    • symbolic proximity
    • affective proximity
    • emotional closeness
  • These deepen when the other becomes someone who matters in one’s life—not only a neighbor in space, but a fellow human being.

• No separation between socio-cognitive and socio-affective processes

  • The speaker argues against separating thinking/learning from emotions/affect.
  • If a student is humiliated or suffering, learning and performance are blocked because suffering consumes school time and energy.

• Violence is not only physical: “there is no soft violence”

  • Violence includes subtle forms:
    • teasing
    • nicknames
    • humiliation
    • derogatory language (tied to skin color, nationality, indigenous identity, gender, disability, body/appearance, etc.)
  • Contempt and humiliation produce self-deprecation:
    • students feel worthless, not recognized, not respected
    • some respond with self-harm and even suicide attempts

• Language and “the school gaze” can harm or validate

  • Words can hurt, not just blows.
  • Mechanism: the gaze (looks, gestures, interpretations of being looked at with contempt).
  • Contemptuous gazes can start or escalate harm, including violence toward others and toward oneself.

• Data point from a school survey

  • About a year prior to the talk, a survey involved 40,023 high school students.
  • 35% identified humiliation as a daily source of suffering.
  • Reported reasons included: skin color, nationality, indigenous status, gender, disability, neighborhood, clothing, physical appearance, and ways of thinking.
  • About 5 out of 10 students reported humiliation tied to physical characteristics (especially skin color, clothing, appearance).
  • Students also reported fear (rejection, not fitting in, not making friends, gender violence, humiliation, physical assault).
  • Conclusion: behind violence there is an effect of suffering that can destabilize schooling:
    • students may drop out or experience discontinuous educational trajectories.

• Affective justice: repairing harm through care

  • The speaker proposes affective justice:
    • violence must be interrupted
    • harm must be recognized
    • repair must be done with others
  • “Loving gestures” and “loving words” are described as restorative.
  • Grief should be processed communally in school, not isolated as private mourning.

• Making emotions public (not trapped in the private sphere)

  • Emotions should not be confined to private life.
  • Schools should socialize feelings so students learn empathy and aren’t indifferent to others’ suffering.
  • Critique: modern culture pressures people to appear happy, hiding suffering and preventing processing.
  • School should teach processing and channeling, not suppressing feelings.

• Loneliness and exclusion as part of the emotional ecology

  • Loneliness connects to social pain and suffering.
  • Schools must identify and interrupt exclusion:
    • students alone at recess
    • students not invited to activities
    • students not included in groups or ridiculed/rejected
  • Exclusion can be visible or subtle; teachers need to pay attention to group dynamics.

• Curriculum and storytelling as tools for empathy and repair

  • The talk extends beyond classroom behavior to curricular narratives:
    • what stories are taught
    • who the protagonists are
    • which groups students identify with or reject
  • Students should develop:
    • empathetic imagination (imagining how the other feels)
    • recognition that humiliation is violence
    • learning how harm is repaired
  • Empathy must lead to action: feeling affected isn’t enough.

• Wrap-up metaphor: children “broken” vs. school as repair

  • A teacher said that after listening, she realized “children are broken.”
  • The speaker reframes this:
    • if children are broken, they are suffering with wounded subjectivity
    • school’s role is to repair social wounds
    • through relational dynamics of loving pedagogy and empathy, students can become less “broken.”

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Methodology / instruction-like framework (as presented)

A) Build empathy through affective cultures in school

• Generate affective cultures so that:
  • children do not feel alone
  • children feel accompanied
  • students learn to live together with others
• Focus specifically on empathy defined as:
  • registering pain
  • validating wounds
  • enabling “I feel your pain”

B) Treat socialization as a central educational practice

• In classrooms and school groups, intentionally support:
  • bonds with adults
  • bonds with peers
  • building reciprocity, respect, and empathetic links
• Aim for symbolic/affective proximity, not only physical closeness.

C) Integrate socio-emotional processes with learning

• Do not separate:
  • socio-cognitive (learning/academic performance)
  • socio-affective (emotions/relationship harm)
• When students suffer (humiliation, contempt), expect learning difficulties and address suffering—not only cognitive deficits.

D) Identify all forms of violence and interrupt normalization

• Recognize that “violence” includes:
  • humiliation and teasing
  • derogatory language (identity, body, appearance, disability, etc.)
  • contempt expressed through words and looks
• When found:
  • stop the harm
  • record/document the damage it causes (what the other feels)
  • teach repair, not only punishment

E) Practice “affective justice” (repair + rehumanization)

• Teach students to:
  • name the harm
  • understand the other as a human subject
  • perform reparation gestures together
• Use restorative, loving communication:
  • “loving words/gestures” as tools for repair

F) Make emotions public in school

• Move grief, fear, anger, and sadness into:
  • community processing
  • public/shared dialogue
• Replace “hide suffering and appear happy” with:
  • legitimate emotional expression and shared understanding

G) Use narratives and curriculum to cultivate empathetic imagination

• Choose/structure classroom narratives to:
  • increase identification with empathy, cooperation, solidarity
  • decrease identification with hatred/cruelty
  • include marginalized perspectives (e.g., disability, refugees, indigenous women)
• Guide students to imagine:
  • “If I were in the other’s place, what would I feel?”
  • how humiliation harms and how it can be repaired

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Speakers / sources featured (identified)

• Karina Kaplan / Carina/Karina Caplan — PhD in Education (Argentine researcher; main speaker)
• Eugenia — referenced as the invitation/organizer (talk’s host introducer)
• Aula Abierta team — referenced as the event organizer/community
• Chat / open classroom community — participant group referenced during the Q&A section
• Marta Nuso / Marta Nus — cited as providing an example linking history teaching, narrative choice, and justice/empathy in schools
• A teacher (unnamed) from a first-grade classroom — example from Kaplan’s fieldwork (mother died; class discusses grief)
• A teacher (unnamed) in the video shown during the class — uses a classroom activity to discuss discrimination (e.g., “pana,” feeling bad when treated differently)
• Referenced real-world case(s):
  • the Argentine school killing involving a student bringing a shotgun from his backpack
  • other deaths mentioned generally (suicide/self-harm; police violence; illness)